Are you really writing rule cases for every conceivable font? What happens if I have my own custom font, unknown to Perfect Layout?
Yes. You can't do layout automation without knowing what the music symbol means.
Ca. 1200 symbols from 500 music fonts are currently supported by Perfect Layout (all fonts from the
Music Font Comparison and some more). Plus another ca. 1100 music fonts which are partially known to the plug-in.
This font list is also important because adding a font name to MacSymbolFonts.txt influences the symbol slots in Finale. Perfect Layout has to make sure that Finale's font encoding settings match the font engine. The font engine was developed for the music font comparison.
It is also the base for the
automatic music font conversion tool which I used to create the Maestro-compatible Elbsound fonts. The font engine just exchanges the symbols in the fonts, adjusts the metrics and thus more or less automatically generates a fully compatible font.
So it's not rule cases in Perfect Layout for each font, but a font database where each font symbol is linked to a symbol type.
The plug-in itself works font-independent and only checks for a symbol type, for example:
Read the articulation font name and symbol
Check in the font database what the symbol means
Do whatever is required with that symbol
Unknown music fonts are either expected to be Maestro-compatible which is usually the case in Finale - or the semantics are unknown to the plug-in which obviously means: the plug-in does not know what to do best with a symbol.
That's one of Finale's advantages over SMuFl. You can use any font. But without semantics layout automation is limited.
In practice it's not that relevant:
in Finale most fonts (or better: symbol slots) are Maestro-compatible or fonts for special symbols which aren't included in automatic placement, but only taken into account for collision removal of other symbols or better spacing. It's also mainly articulation symbols in Finale that are sensitive, for example for the order of automatic stacking.
The plug-in warns the user if it detects any font issues.
If you want to have a font (name) added to the list of "known" music fonts, just send me a mail and it will be included in the next update.
To come back to Sebastian again: I very much recommend to change the name to also avoid conflicts with existing installations of the old Sebastian v1 font. Nasty font cache updates are probably required and/or several font files may exist in the Windows font folders.
There will also be conflicts with old font annotation files and the MacSymbolFonts.txt file, if these aren't replaced correctly.